The Ashram of Graton Road: Morning Star Ranch, a California Commune in the 1960's

IN THE SUMMER OF 1967 I was living in Sonoma County, California, some sixty miles north of San Francisco.I had recently resigned from the ministry of the local Unitarian Fellowship, but remained Chairman of the county's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which I had founded the previous year.And in that capacity I paid a visit to Morning Star Ranch, the infamous hippie commune on Graton Road, near the town of Occidental.All through the summer Morning Star had been big news in the county.The news items which graced almost every issue of the daily paper 1 were supplemented by a series of pieces by a respected feature writer, and these were well enough done for the reader to gain a fairly accurate and unbiased picture of what was going on there.I thus knew that some 160 persons were living on 31.7 acres that summer.I also knew that the property belonged to Lou Gottlieb, musical genius, bass player and narrator of the immensely popular folk-song group, The Limeliters, and founder of Morning Star.I knew that Gottlieb had retired from show business and purchased Morning Star and that shortly thereafter, following some kind of revelation, he had opened up the land to any and all persons who wanted to come and live there with him.And finally I knew that not everyone approved of this generosity.Many county residents, led by Dr. Gottlieb's Graton Road neighbors, began putting pressure on the county authorities to do something about the invasion of hippies, to send them back to wherever they had come from.That some of this opposition was pure discrimination was Jefferson P.